HP Made A TV Ad Entirely Of Vines

Hewlett-Packard has enlisted some social media star-power for its latest TV ad.

HP on Monday unveiled a new 30-second spot for the Pavilion x360 — a notebook that can also turn into a tablet — made entirely out of Vines, the Twitter-owned looping video platform.

The ad strings together short videos made by high-profile Vine craftspeople like Robby Ayala, who boasts 2.8 million followers on the mobile app, which he uses to post silly videos. HP says it worked with Niche, a marketing agency that specializes in Vine stars, to find talent for the spot. It’s almost as if we’ve entered a new era of the celebrity endorsement.

The idea, says Rob Le Bras-Brown, HP’s senior vice president of marketing in its printing and personal systems unit, was to “find creative people in social media, particularly ‘vine-ographers,’ and give them the machine and invite them to be creative with it in six seconds.”

Zach King, for example, has amassed 1.7 million followers on Vine for visual tricks like this.

Mr. Le Bras-Brown said that the Vine stars had relative freedom to create their own six-second videos with the product. HP’s creative agency 180LA also worked on the spot. A normal production timeline for a 30-second TV ad can run 10 to 12 weeks, HP says, but the new Vine ad only took about 11 days from start to finish.

HP isn’t the first brand to bring Vine to TV. Dunkin Donuts, Trident, and Airbnb have all used the platform for ads of their own.

Marketers are clearly itching to further connect TV and digital audiences, but whether Vine will continue to meld into TV advertising — or if it’s just a flash in the pan platform — remains to be seen.

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